12. Dead Sea Scrolls

MS in Hebrew on red-brown vellum, Jerusalem, 170-150 BC, 1 fragment of a scroll, 2,9x7,4 cm, (0,3x3,5 cm remaining), 1 line in a late archaic or early Hasmonean semiformal book script, last line of 1 column with 2,3 cm lower margin preserved.

MS in Hebrew on red-brown vellum, Jerusalem, 170-150 BC, 1 fragment of a scroll, 2,9x7,4 cm, (0,3x3,5 cm remaining), 1 line in a late archaic or early Hasmonean semiformal book script, last line of 1 column with 2,3 cm lower margin preserved.

This collection includes 115 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments plus artefacts from the Essene community that hid this important Jewish library from Roman soldiers in AD 68. The fragments were among those found by the Bedouin in cave 1 in Qumran in late 1946, Cave 4 in 1952, and cave 11 in 1956, and subsequently sold to the dealer Kando in Bethlehem. They were unknown to the scholarly community until they became part of The Schøyen Collection.